Parenting & Family Quote by Martha Gellhorn

"It is alleged" does the sneakiest kind of work here: it pretends to be modest while throwing a punch at anyone who wants the story softened. Martha Gellhorn is writing as a journalist who has seen enough official euphemism to recognize it as a second battlefield. The clause signals the bureaucratic voice that always shows up after a catastrophe, preferring cautious verbs to human beings. In a single phrase, she vents contempt for the kind of “objectivity” that can sound like moral anesthesia.

Then comes the number: half a million. Not a flourish, a weight. Gellhorn isn’t chasing statistics for their own sake; she’s forcing scale onto readers who might otherwise file the Spanish Civil War under “foreign troubles.” The list “men, women and children” is bluntly democratic, a refusal to let the refugees be reframed as combatants, agitators, or faceless masses. She’s stripping away the propaganda categories and returning them to the oldest, most inconvenient one: civilians.

The context sharpens the edge. Franco’s victory wasn’t just a regime change; it was a consolidation of power built on terror, reprisals, and the elimination of political enemies. The flight to France (La Retirada) was one of Europe’s great pre-World War II displacement crises, and Gellhorn is pointing at the moral scandal hiding in plain sight: this happened, in modern Europe, and the world learned to speak about it in hedges.

Her intent is to make the hedging sound obscene. The subtext: if you need “alleged” to believe it, you’ve already chosen a side.